Storytelling through Social Media

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are designed for users to be able to express what is on their mind in an effortless manner. What happens when someone decides to use this in a creative way? Storytelling.

Virtually any platform that lends itself to posting written content can lead to storytelling in one way or another. And, in a sense, by publishing posts about their daily errands, thoughts or feelings, users share their real stories through the use of social media. This post, however, is focused on the intentional creation of short stories through the use of digital platforms and, more specifically, Twitter.

Although the site allows only 140 characters per post, this does not stop people from using it as a creative resource. Short stories have begun to appear in social media in different ways, one of which is the MashableReads challenge. Mashable.com provided its users with the opportunity to think creatively in order to fit their fictional ideas into the length of a tweet. Here are some of my personal favorites:

Image taken from here.

Image taken from here.

Fiction told through social media also makes the entire experience more interactive. As Andrew Fitzgerald explains in his TED talk, one of the most engaging digital storytelling techniques is to give readers the opportunity to tune in while the story is being posted. New Yorker Fiction did exactly that. This changes everything, as the control in the flow of the story is not in the reader, but in the writer. Instead of having the entire story finished and printed in their hands in the form of a book, readers have to anticipate and wait for each individual tweet in order to see how things progress.

The speech includes a few more examples of digital storytelling, but I found these two the most interesting. They demonstrate that art is adaptable, it does not suffer if traditional means of creativity become less popular or are completely removed due to better alternatives. On the contrary, creativity takes advantage of new technology and demonstrates that any resource can be put to good use, however limiting it can be.